More Femme-Relevant Books!
More Femme-Relevant Books and Authors!
This is going to be in installments, even though Sassafrass covered a huge portion of the femme canon I have a lot to say. Here are some books I love. Coming soon: the books on my reading list, and a list of favorite pieces from anthologies.
Whipping Girl, Julia Serano
Hey girls, did you hear the news? It’s been scientifically proven that barrettes are dangerous! So are bracelets and bric-a-brac. It’s a fact. And don’t be fooled by the thick-necked macho men who pretend that “girl stuff†is boring or frivolous…
Serano’s central topic is how attitudes towards femininity in general shape treatment of transwomen. There’s some trans 101, and a lot of interesting debunking of those “scientific†studies about how men’s and women’s brains are sooo different. It includes some incisive commentary about dyke communities’ treatment of transwomen. Whipping Girl is not about femme identity, but she draws strong connections between attitudes towards transwomen and some dyke communities and attitudes towards femmes. The chapter “Putting the Feminine Back Into Feminism†should be required reading for, well, everyone. I was lucky to see Serano read at a Center for New Words event last summer (where I met Havalah for the first time, it was a fated night) and she spoke a lot to the femmes in the audience about those connections.
Serano is a biologist, but she’s also a writer, musician and spoken word artist, and some of her more creative work, like the “Barrette Manifesto†I quoted above, is also included.
S/HE, Minnie Bruce Pratt
I just don’t know what to say about this book. It is so phenomenal. It’s a collection of personal essays and prose poems that center around Pratt’s relationship with Les Feinberg. I first read it several years ago and I was blown away by the beautiful way she writes about sex.
Wanting you to take me, burn me up, nothing left of me but ashes, potash to the ground. Wanting you to sift me through your hands, disperse me, gather me up again, handle me, your hands gritty with me, as all the while you call me “Treasure. Precious.â€
I re-read it again this fall, just after the first Femme Show, when I was really dealing with so many emotions around my identity, and I just cried and cried. Pratt talks about subsuming her femininity as a girl because she wanted to be smart, brain not body, then coming out in the early women’s movement, and finally coming into femme identity.
She perfectly describes that thing I have such a hard time explaining, the specific way femmes sometimes care for butches, the affirmation and understanding across so much difference. I don’t know why I want that so much, why it feels so important, but I do.
My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home, Amber Hollibaugh
This collection includes writings from 1979-2000, with interviews and personal essays alongside political articles, so it feels a little disjointed or dated at times, but it’s great history. She deals with class, race sex work, aging, and AIDS, for a start.
A lot of the book deals with the “sex wars†of the 80’s between sex positive feminists and anti-pornography, anti-butch femme, anti-dildo (really!), anti-bdsm feminists.
Her conversation with CherrÃe Moraga, “What We’re Rolling Around in Bed With†is a classic.
My favorite is the title piece:
I live in a world that makes wanting sex, actualizing and realizing desire, a thing of danger. But this is what I want: to be my own idiom and my own voice. To call the shots - even when what I most want is a lover who calls the shots. To love butch women without apology or fear. To be acclaimed in my own flagrant femme-girl body and high femme attitude. To be a warrior against shame of the erotic and for the right to taste and smell passion’s will.
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